Family Memory XVII: Papa, the bicycle, and France 1940

A long time ago, I wrote the story of my Grandfather’s battlefield heroism. That’s here: Family Memory (6-7 April 1941). That was not his first experience with combat or war though. He’d served in Poland during September 1939 and then in Fall Gelb, the invasion of France in May-June 1940. It was in France that my great-uncle was killed. That’s part of this story: MARCH 1945.

When he was in France, he came across a bicycle. Ask any infantryman if they prefer to walk or do something easier–they’ll go with riding every time. At some point about a week into the campaign (around May 17th or so), he was asked to carry a message from his battalion to the neighboring unit since they weren’t in radio contact—I suspect the fact that he’d picked up the bicycle may have helped in the decision to send Corporal Haas.

So…he took off on the bicycle at a nice pace. He’d been told something along the lines of ‘take the third right’ but the orders were counting a trail as a path, so that while riding, he didn’t count that small trail/dead end as a road. That meant instead of taking the proper road, he went one road too far.

The road he took led to a smallish village (under 1,000 people). When he road into the town square, the residents there stopped whatever they were doing and stared at him riding. My grandfather was not a stupid man and realized the situation–he wasn’t in the right spot and had left German lines 2-3 kilometers behind him. He was the first German those people had seen.

He did what you or I would do if we were a soldier in that situation. He calmly circled the square and rode back out of town back towards friendly lines. He found the proper road, delivered the message, and got back to his unit…at which point he had to ditch the bike as the men were put onto trucks and moved elsewhere (I don’t know why–it may have been because they were pionere–assault engineers).

Talking to me when I was a boy, my grandfather laughed at the story and relished telling it–but he also admitted in his laughter that when he realized he was far beyond his lines, “I nearly shit my trousers.” Can you imagine something like that when you are nineteen years old?

For me, I can think of several things from nineteen I laugh about now with friends or my kids but in the moment, my reaction was the same…stay calm while shitting my trousers.